Saturday, July 14, 2012

Jo Nesbo on books to read in your teens


Jo Nesbo, star of Scandinavian crime fiction, recommends books to read before you're 20

The Norwegian author Jo Nesbo
The Norwegian author Jo Nesbo Photo: AFP

I read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955) when I was in my teens. I thought it would be a very sexually exciting book and it wasn't at all. But what it did – like Jean Genet’s The Thief's Journal (1949), which was a scandal because it was so explicit about being a homosexual — was describe love and sexual feelings in areas you’ve never been yourself. And, of course, Lolita has the greatest opening lines in literature.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) was my introduction to the great tradition of American storytelling. I think there’s a line you can draw from Mark Twain to John Irving, which is more about storytelling than about writing. Knut Hamsun’s Hunger (1890), on the other hand, is all about writing. It’s about a very passionate, desperate young man wandering the streets of Oslo at a time when it was not the most expensive city in Europe. It applies to young men with ambition becoming artists and being in love. Hamsun is the Scandinavian Dostoevsky; a Nobel Prize-winner and a great writer of prose.
When I was a young man I went to Spain on an InterRailing trip and brought with me The Sun Also Rises (1926). I went to Pamplona, of course, and I travelled in Ernest Hemingway’s footsteps. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) was his masterpiece, maybe his only masterpiece. His characters were travelling and inventing a new way of life, before the hippies, but pioneers of that lifestyle. And it made me listen to jazz, too.
Jo Nesbo will be appearing at the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate on July 22. For more details see harrogateinternationalfestivals.com/crime

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